Who does not know how feeble and hollow British poetry had become in the eighteenth century, just before the appearance of Cowper? Compelled to appear in the costume of the court, it had acquired its artificiality; and dealing with the conventional manners and outside aspects of men, it had almost forsaken the human heart, the proper haunt and main region of song. Instead of being the vehicle of lofty and noble sentiments, it had degenerated into a mere trick of art,—a hand-organ operation, in which one man could grind out tunes nearly as well as another. A certain monotonous smoothness, a perpetually recurring assortment of images, had become so much the traditional property of the versifiers, that one could set himself up in the business as a shopkeeper might supply himself with his stock in trade. The style that prevailed has been aptly termed by the poet Lowell “the Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called the wine “rosy,” sleep “balmy,” so did these correct gentlemen always employ a glib epithet or a diffuse periphrasis to express the commonest ideas. The sun was never called by his plain, almanac name, but always “Phœbus,” or “the orb of day.” The moon was known only as “Cynthia,” “Diana,” or “the refulgent lamp of night.” Naïads were as plenty in every stream as trout or pickerel. If these poets wished to say tea, they would write
“Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.”
Coffee would be nothing less than
“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray.”
A boot would be raised to
“The shining leather that the leg encased.”
A wig was “Alecto’s snaky tresses”; a person traversing St. Giles was “Theseus threading the labyrinth of Crete”; and a magistrate sitting in judgment was nothing less than “Minos” or “Rhadamanthus.” If a poet wished to speak of a young man’s falling in love, he set himself to relate how Cupid laid himself in ambush in the lady’s eye, and from that fortress shot forth a dart at the breast of the unhappy youth, who straightway began to writhe under his wound, and found no ease till the lady was pleased to smile upon him. All women in that golden age were “nymphs”; “dryads” were as common as birds; carriages were “harnessed pomps”; houses, humble or stately “piles”; and not a wind could blow, whether the sweet South, or “Boreas, Cecias, or Argestes loud,” but it was “a gentle zephyr.” Pope satirized this conventional language in the well known lines:
“While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes,